


no one calls you honey (when you're sitting on a throne)

by kindclaws



Series: bingo, chopped, and prompts [8]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, The 100 (TV) Season 7 Speculation, YOU get some catharsis and YOU get some catharsis, and the Anomaly as a totally benevolent therapist, featuring: conversations that should have happened 5 seasons ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-13 17:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21001358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: “It would have been easier if you died in Praimfaya,” Raven confesses, when it is dark and no one is supposed to be awake.Clarke hears.





	no one calls you honey (when you're sitting on a throne)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a submission for The 100 Chopped Challenge! What that means is that it must contain these four prompts:  
1\. Ghosts!  
2\. A fake kiss that starts as an accident, joke, dare, or distraction, and becomes real  
3\. An overheard conversation  
4\. One character struggling to talk because they're laughing or crying
> 
> **PERMISSIONS:** Please do not download and save this fic locally. I make frequent revisions and don't like the idea of old versions being out there, and if I ever decide I hate it, I'll orphan it rather than delete it so you'll still be able to find and read it! I'm open to translations and podfics, but please contact me on tumblr first. Do not upload to other sites. Do not claim as your own.

“_Fuck_.”

The sharp curse cuts through Clarke’s dream. The traces of it linger at the corners of her consciousness. Something sunlit. The taste of fruit. It’s only a fleeting memory before her eyes open and she registers near-darkness. The massive planet that hangs overhead in the sky, reflecting a pale silver glow over the campsite, still feels alien and foreboding even after a few weeks on Sanctum. 

Out of the silence, noise comes again. A harsh intake of breath as though through pain, a muffled thump. Clarke’s hand curls around the hilt of the knife underneath the balled-up sweater she’s using as a pillow. It’s cool and familiar to the touch. Once, it belonged to a warrior of the shallow valley. Now, she plans to be holding it with a white-knuckled grip when she finally dies.

“This _fucking_ planet - “ the voice swears. Quieter, now. She’s not trying to wake anyone else. “Moon,” Raven corrects herself, an afterthought barely loud enough for Clarke to hear. Distantly, insects hum. Clarke relaxes her grip on the knife, tries to do the same with the rest of her body. The forest is dark enough that dawn is still likely a few hours away, and she needs the rest. They all do. But the adrenaline lingers, some cold creature with its jaws gripping her spine between needle-teeth. Every muscle still remains taut and rigid. If the light from the planet that looms above them were any brighter, she could never pass for someone still sleeping.

“Clarke?” Raven asks, her voice as soft as a breath. Clarke struggles to keep her breathing steady and her fingers loose around the knife. To her body it doesn’t matter that over a century has passed. It still seems like weeks ago that the world had been reduced to her and Madi. Two living people on the surface of the planet, and anything else that went bump in the night was at once a threat and a miracle.

Part of her wants to roll onto her other side, meet Raven’s eyes in the moonlight - _planetlight?_ \- and face the overdue reckoning. Something keeps her stiff and silent, trapped between her own racing heartbeat and the stubborn desire to pretend she hadn’t heard anything.

“Clarke, are you awake?”

Clarke is the nearest person to her, probably the only one in earshot. The others have laid out in pairs, whether it just so happened or they consciously made the choice to bed down next to the people they love, Clarke doesn’t know. She only knows the faint bitter taste at the back of her throat that has little to do with the rations they ate when they made camp, and a terrible restlessness in her chest that makes her want to rush back to the crumbling city of the Primes to make sure Madi is all right. It made sense to leave her behind when they made that choice in daylight, with the mystery of the Anomaly hanging in their future, a yawning black hole with the answers they need. Now, her absence only hurts, and casts the fractures between Clarke and her companions into sharper light.

For a while, there is only silence. Then -

“It would have been easier if you died in Praimfaya,” Raven says to the night.

Clarke cannot help her gasp. Once, in the shallow valley, she tumbled down a gorge, spraining her ankle badly and gaining a concussion that plagued her with headaches for weeks. In the first moment after the impact, she’d laid sprawled at the bottom, a trickle of water soaking her hair and her back, the stars bright and silent overhead. She hadn’t been able to breathe at first. Her ribs had felt like massive talons squeezing her lungs shut. She’d wondered, for a moment, if they’d punctured something. If there was a pocket of the vacuum of space that had killed Jake Griffin growing in her own chest.

The first breath, when it came, stung the whole way down her throat and made her eyes leak tears at the corners. It was an ugly sound. The sound of something that wouldn’t lie down and die.

The breath that Clarke lets out now is almost an echo of that breath, released over a century ago under a very different sky. There was no fall, this time, except for the one of her own making. No impact, except Raven’s words landing like one of the worst blows she’s ever taken. She sits up, fingers scrambling.

“You were awake?” Raven asks, quiet and furious.

Clarke wants to say something. Disembodied words trail through her mind. Something about cowardice - but no, Raven has said words with similar roots to her face.

She just stands, instead. The restlessness, the slow-moving dread in her veins that first woke her, it feels worse now. She’ll rest later, after the Anomaly, after they get the answers Bellamy so desperately needs. The knife that was under her pillow goes back into its sheath. There are guns, by Bellamy, but they’re not worth the risk of going closer and waking him, or anyone else. And if something finds her in the woods - chances are, it won’t be something that can be stopped by bullets. There are no predators in this forest but the ones that walk on two legs and speak languages that were seeded on a long-barren Earth.

Leaves crunch under Clarke’s foot as she takes her first steps away. Too loud. She makes an effort not to stomp.

“Wait,” Raven says. “Don’t go. That came out wrong.”

Something hot and ugly screams inside Clarke’s chest. She thought she’d built enough scar tissue over it by now, but she whirls on her heel, bares her teeth.

“You told me you wish I was dead,” she hisses. “_How_ is there supposed to be a right way to say that?"

"There isn't," Raven says. "Just give me a goddamn moment, Clarke. I don't know how to do this."

But she’s had plenty of practice.

"I'm really tired of everyone hating me, Raven. I don't know how long I'm willing to stand here and take this.”

She turns back, snaps a twig under her foot.

"We mourned you," Raven blurts out. "On the ring. For months the only things we talked about were how to get the algae farm running, and you.”

A cruel wind tears at Clarke’s hair and makes her aware that her cheeks are cold. She raises two fingers and touches the skin underneath her eye. Tears. She doesn’t know when they came. Maybe she was already crying in her sleep. What was she dreaming of, again? Apples. Something sweet, and forever lost.

“_I_ mourned you. I stayed up at night for _years_ wondering what I should have done and where I could have changed something to make sure you were on my goddamn rocket when I took off,” Raven continues. Clarke turns back to look at her. The darkness washes away most of the details, but she knows Raven’s profile, sees the silhouette of her fists on her thigh. “You stopped being a person, Clarke. You became this weird, I don't know... like a symbol of all our regrets. I felt so fucking guilty for leaving you, and not being good enough, and that made me work harder on getting us off the ring, and that was good. So I fed the guilt, and in my head, you became something else. A ghost."

"But I'm not a symbol," Clarke whispers, a tear slipping down one cheek. "I don't want to be. I am a _person_."

"Yeah," Raven says, and suddenly she sounds tired and defeated. "I figured that out after we came down and you went right back to your old bullshit."

"I didn't see another choice," Clarke says.

Raven gives her an unreadable look.

"I realized that we never talked about Finn," Raven says eventually. When Clarke makes a pained grimace, Raven raises a palm up, signaling Clarke to hear her out. "I thought about that for a while on the ring. We had a lot of time to think. I bet you did too."

"Too much time," Clarke mutters.

"I know why you killed Finn now," Raven admits. "I know it was the kindest thing that you could have done. So I forgive you for that."

Clarke is torn between gratitude and fury. How dare Raven dig up six year old wounds for the hazy memory of a boy whose bones are probably dust now? How dare she stick a scalpel so unflinchingly into the scar tissue they've both built up between them? She doesn't answer because she _can't_, because she's reeling from a pardon she resigned herself to never hearing a long time ago.

She's silent for so long, her fists trembling at her sides, that Raven speaks again.

"What I don't forgive you for, Clarke," Raven says carefully, and Clarke prepares herself for the blow. She itches to run deeper into the forest. There's nothing keeping her here. The years have rotted away whatever friendship might have bloomed between them in a kinder universe, and Clarke isn't willing to keep holding her heart out on a platter and have it slapped to the floor by uncaring hands. " - is for not talking to me about it."

That's nothing close to what Clarke was expecting to hear out of her mouth.

"What?" she asks, dumbfounded.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Raven says. She reaches for her walking stick before Clarke can argue for or against her inclusion on the trail Clarke so very clearly wants to blaze away from the camp. They both know that if Clarke really wanted to, she could leave Raven behind.

So they walk. Leaves crunch under four feet and the rhythmic _thump_ of the walking stick against the forest floor. Clarke still remembers the moment she found Raven. The pod in the forest, still smoking gently, the trickle of bright red blood against the brown of her skin, and Raven’s face as Clarke helped her climb out and she beheld the sky she loved so much for the first time from the ground. Raven. White teeth. A softness around her eyes as she spun around in the clearing, arms spread wide, that never quite came back afterwards. It was early autumn then, too, and there had been the crunch of leaves beneath their feet.

Through the tree trunks, a soft green glow beckons. Phosphorescence. In their Earth science textbooks there was a throwaway line about plankton in the oceans, massive glowing clouds of them undulating with the waves. Maybe, after this, they will get to see if Sanctum has oceans. Raven starts walking faster, and Clarke can hear her breathing, a little too rapid, but she feels the urgency, too.

The Anomaly looms overhead. Clarke’s skin buzzes, and she has to look down at her arms to check if there’s some new kind of insect on her. There’s not. At least, nothing visible in the bright green glow. Raven’s face is dream-like as she looks at it.

They weren’t supposed to come here alone. Not without the others, and not without the strategy they were going to put together over breakfast. But the Anomaly is right in front of them, a blinding spiral of light and fire, and Clarke cannot remember why they should stay away.

She has survived everything else, anyway.

“It looks like aurora borealis,” Raven whispers. “From above, like a galaxy. When I was a baby I used to wonder how we knew the Milky Way was a spiral, if we could only see it from this angle.”

Clarke snorts. Of course. She’s thinking about plankton. Raven looks at it and still sees the stars.

“Are we going in?” Clarke asks. Something whispers at the edge of her awareness. A familiar voice. Another memory. There have been a lot of them, lately.

“Yeah. Let’s put the ghosts to rest,” Raven says.

Clarke’s surprised when Raven takes her hand, but maybe she shouldn’t have been. The outstretched arm of the Anomaly swings outwards, a wall of wispy green fire that seems to bend reality at the edges, and she flinches just as it washes over them. She expects heat, burning, but there is only cold, and beyond, the night has gotten darker. The ringed planet hanging over the sky is gone. In its place there is only their familiar moon, and it is watching over a hill dotted with warriors and torches.

The warriors are… suggestions. Their bodies flicker at the edges, like the Anomaly did. There are no faces underneath the hoods and beneath the bone-studded masks. The most solid figures - the ones they came for - are at the top of the hill.

“How’s your leg?” Clarke automatically murmurs.

“Good enough for this,” Raven says, and they start hiking. Clarke does not dare to look away from the stake plunged into the hill’s crest. "You didn't give me a say in what happened to the first person I ever loved," Raven says. "I gave you that knife hoping you would find a way to save him, and you didn't give me any warning before you killed him - "

"I didn't make the decision until I was already in front of him," Clarke argues. The boy at the top of the hill raises his head and stares at him. Clarke blinks and he is already dead, the dark stain already spreading across his gut, his chin lolling against his chest. She blinks again and he is still alive, watching them impassively. She wonders what Raven sees when she lets go of Clarke’s hand and takes the last few steps. She cups Finn’s face in one palm. It’s strange, seeing them now. Raven is taller, and the past six years show in her bone structure. Six years Finn Collins never got to age.

“I don’t know what goodbye I would have given,” Raven says softly. “Or gotten.”

“Raven,” the body tied to the stake rasps. His voice makes Clarke flinch. If she doesn’t look at the incorporeal warriors, or the way the flickering torches cast no shadows on the ground, she can pretend this is somewhat real. But his voice doesn’t sound right. It’s only the best approximation the Anomaly can make between their memories.

“You’ve haunted us long enough,” Raven tells him. “Go.” Clarke blinks and he is dead again. She blinks again and he is fading away, and so are the warriors, and there are only ghostly green afterimages on the back of her eyelids.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

"It's not just about Finn," Raven says, sounding frustrated. She fists her hands in Clarke’s jacket. "It's everything that came after it, too. On the ring, we learned to talk to each other. Well, except Murphy. But the rest of us, we decided everything together. Good and bad. I don't want to be blindsided by another one of your decisions on who gets to live ever again," Raven says. "If you want to be one of us, we face everything together. We'll find solutions that don't involve more murder."

"And if we can't find other solutions?" Clarke asks softly. The death of the Primes, and the stunned silence that still lingers over their exorcised city unsettles her whenever she thinks of it. (She thinks of it often.)

"Then we'll deal with that together too," Raven says flatly. "But no more secrets. No more bullshit."

"I didn't think you wanted me in your family."

Silence.

When Raven begins to cry, there is no buildup, hardly any warning. In the space of a heartbeat her face crumples, her mouth turning down at the corners, and then she drops the walking stick and curls in on herself. Clarke catches her before she hits the ground, and Raven turns into her, pressing her face into Clarke’s collarbone. Her hands grasp desperately at her jacket. Clarke reaches up and gives Raven her hand to hold, instead, and then they are rocking back and forth together on the ground, a bed of damp and rotting leaves beneath them.

“It’s okay,” Clarke says, over and over, even though it’s not, in the voice she used to use when Madi had nightmares about the weeks she spent in shallow valley alone, surrounded by decomposing bodies she was too small to move.

When Finn died he died very quietly. When Finn died Raven made the loudest noise in the world, a howl, maddened and stricken. Clarke never wants to hear that sound again.

“I’m - “ Raven says, sounding choked. Her sobs are far too violent to let her get the words out. As she hiccups, Clarke draws her closer.

“Shh,” she whispers. _I don’t want to hear you cry anymore_, she thinks selfishly.

“I’m _tired_ \- “ Raven gasps between her sobs, drawing in air in short and painful-sound gasps. Clarke thinks again of falling into the gorge. The impact. Staring up at the stars, waiting for the air to creep back in. “ - of losing - the people I - _love_.”

Clarke closes her eyes and knows without a doubt there’s another cold body to say goodbye to. Another ghost haunting them.

Behind them, Zeke begins to gasp for air.

In her time as a reluctant field medic tossed head-first into the sorts of injuries her training on the Ark hadn't thought to emphasize, Clarke has heard a lot of last breaths, and there's a sort of recognizable melody to them now. Most people, upon realizing that dragging air into their lungs hurts when they're dying, unconsciously start to hold their breath in fits and starts. But the human body doesn't allow itself not to breathe for long, and eventually, the need for one more breath of oxygen, even now when the number of breaths left can be counted on fingers, forces them to gasp for it more painfully than they would have otherwise.

When Zeke starts gasping, Raven makes a quiet, pained sound and whirls around, stumbling through the green haze searching for him. Clarke closes her eyes and rocks back for a moment, recognizing more than one voice in the sounds he's making. Atom. Miles. Tris. Finn. Lexa. Others, an endless parade of people she could not save. Only then does she get to her feet and follow after Raven.

Out of the fog, the evenly-spaced posts of Sanctum's perimeter appear. Their lines are harsh and unyielding, in stark contrast to the way everything else in the Anomaly moves, with faint ripples, like they're dreaming underwater. Clarke's first thought is confusion. They can't have traveled that far yet - it would take more than a few hours to retrace their steps out into the woods, and the sky is still dark, hours from dawn. There hasn't been enough time.

Then she sees Raven at the fence's foot, crouched over Zeke in a bed of dead and drying leaves. Dread sinks cold claws into Clarke.

"Raven?" she whispers, afraid to be heard.

It was one thing for Raven to offer an olive branch back at the camp, surrounded by sleeping bodies they both want to love and protect, the mass of that beautiful planet hanging over them as a constant reminder that this entire moon was the new beginning Monty had wanted for them. Finn's death was a sin that belonged to their old lives. A wound six years and a century old.

But what happened to Zeke, happened just days ago. It happened here. And the soft sounds of Zeke's death remind Clarke that Raven most definitely blames her for it, and not so long ago, Echo was ready to kill Clarke, and Raven's silent complicity was a sharper knife than anything else.

"Raven?" Clarke whispers again.

A shiver creeps down her spine as Raven raises her head.

"Is this how it happened?" Raven asks.

They already told her the story. Raven already screamed herself hoarse with the ways they could have and should have done better. But someone else's words cannot do justice - not really - to a death you haven't seen with your own eyes.

Clarke takes a few hesitant steps forward, coming close enough to see Zeke's gasping mouth and his cracked and bleeding skin. The radiation would have torn him up from the inside too, she knows. Even if they'd managed to patch his skin, somehow, he would have exsanguinated before any nightblood treatment could take effect. She knows there was no saving him. She knows. She knows.

She still feels guilt like a cloying sweetness in the back of her throat.

"Yes," Clarke chokes out. The Anomaly, to its credit, has done a good job of reconstructing the damage from her memories.

Raven makes a quiet, pained sound, so different from the howl that ripped loose from her when Finn died. Lose enough, Clarke thinks, and you get better at it. Even when you think you'll never get used to it, that it'll never get any easier. You do. It does.

"I wish we'd had more time," Raven says, and Zeke's ghost finally breathes his last. The ground opens up and swallows his body, leaving only streaks of soil on Raven's fingers and scattered dead leaves.

Their ragged breathing echoes throughout the hollow.

"This is the worst walk ever," Raven says at last. "And most of mine suck, so the bar is really low."

"Well," Clarke says. "That's all our ghosts, isn't it?"

She holds out her hand and after a long and stressful moment, Raven finally takes it. Clarke hauls her up to her feet and Raven stumbles against her. Clarke expects her to immediately let go of their joined hands but she keeps holding on, her calluses warm and tough against Clarke's. Her eyes have lost some of the ever-present anger she's carried for Clarke lately. Its absence only makes her look more exhausted, and Clarke - from the very beginning, from the moment she found out her father was risking everything, from the moment her mother told her not to take responsibility for ninety-nine other delinquents... Clarke has only ever wanted to help. It hits her now like a wave of sorrow and wistfulness.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. Raven looks at her for another moment, the ringed planet reflected in her dark eyes. Then she sighs heavily and leans her forehead against Clarke's shoulder.

"Yeah," Raven says hoarsely. "Me too."

"Let's go home," Clarke suggests. "Well - to the camp." To the others they left sleeping. They have no home, now, and maybe some still blame Clarke for it as much as they blame Octavia or McCreary. They only have each other now. And sometimes not even that.

The Anomaly stretches out in every direction, an endless green haze that burns between the trees. Raven's compass doesn't work within its borders, so they pick the direction they think they came from - no easy task, when the Anomaly warped the landscape to echo their memories - and walk. Dawn comes earlier on Sanctum, one sun rising before the other. The sky lightens by dreamlike degrees when Clarke is not watching it. By the light of the approaching sunrise the forest seems less frightening.

Less frightening, until the figure emerges from the fog.

Clarke's feet slow beneath her, dragging against damp leaves. She holds tightly to Raven, afraid of her own reflection. For a moment she wonders wildly if this is Josephine returned. Even though Bellamy promised he brought back only one wavelength in her brain, Clarke swears she still sees Josephine skittering at the edges of her vision sometimes. A ghost that won't quite fade. She left her things scattered across Clarke's memories, too. Clarke reaches up with the hand Raven isn't holding and tugs a lock of hair into her field of vision. It's still short, still blonde. The faintest traces remain of the berry dye she and Madi used in a different lifetime. So Clarke is still in her own body.

"Raven?" she asks fearfully.

"I mourned you," Raven says, quiet and flat, and Clarke looks between her and the figure that stands in their way, flanked by green flames.

"No," Clarke says, dropping her hand.

The figure is smaller, softer than Clarke is now. Her hair is longer, half tied back. She hasn't had that jacket in years.

"I told you already," Raven says, growing frustrated.

"I'm not dead."

"We thought you were! I thought I left you behind, and - "

"Everyone else - " Clarke says, her breath rising in a gasp. She means Finn. She means Zeke. The people Raven loved and Clarke killed. The scar tissue.

"You're one of my ghosts too," Raven says. "I - you were the first person I ever saw on the ground," she says, her voice very small. Clarke's younger self watches them from several paces away. The edges of her being ripple with the Anomaly's pulse. "I... I loved you too," Raven whispers.

"You were ready to let me die," Clarke yells. "You've been blaming me for _everything_ \- "

"_I mourned you for six years!_" Raven shouts back.

"Prove it," Clarke snarls, and Raven steps forward, fighting through her limp, and wraps a hand around Clarke's neck. Neither of them is quite expecting Raven's lips on hers - or maybe Clarke is the only one taken by surprise. She doesn't know what to do at first, and Raven's mouth is rigid and unyielding. This can't be called a kiss. There's too much pain and anger in it. Raven bites down on her lip and Clarke gasps against her mouth, her mind reeling. After so many tragedies, she doesn't want to hope.

Raven pulls away with a shuddering gasp and Clarke clutches at her shoulders.

"Everyone I love dies," Raven whispers against her mouth.

"You think I don't know what that feels like?" Clarke asks bitterly. She closes her eyes, forces the fear down. _I'll get go of my ghosts if you do._ "I'm not dead. And I'm not the person you left behind."

Raven tucks a piece of Clarke's hair behind her ear, and it's almost gentle. 

"I know," she murmurs. "I know."

Neither of them search for the ghost at the edge of the Anomaly. Raven leans in, and the second kiss is softer, more real. It tastes like a second chance.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please check out the other works in this challenge. Voting for the fics you thought used a certain trope best begins at the end of this round, if you're so inclined. Authors remain anonymous for the duration of the challenge. My name will be revealed after the voting period. :)
> 
> Title from "A Little Wicked" by Valerie Broussard: "No one calls you honey when you're sitting on a throne." I had it pegged for a Princess Mechanic fic from the first time I heard it.


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